This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007

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Ancient Greece comes to Africa (again): Orfeus and Medea

“Carried by the human imagination for over 3000 years,” writes Brett Bailey in his author-director notes for Third World Bunfight’s production of Orfeus at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the myth of Orpheus has become “as smooth as a river pebble.” What he presumably means is that – while beautiful, even perfect, in its simplicity – it is compact of meaning, a complex story ground down to an archetypal essence.

Orpheus is the original poet figure: a musician whose songs charmed the natural world and moved gods and mortals alike to lyrical heights. He ventured into the Underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, when she died from a snakebite; after meeting the souls of some of those suffering eternal punishment in the afterlife, he was granted permission by Hades, king of the Underworld, to take Eurydice back to Earth. But he faltered at the last moment, forgetting Hades’ injunction not to look behind him, and Eurydice was lost to him forever. In another well-known episode of classical mythology, he was torn limb from limb by the frenzied worshippers of Bacchus (god of wine), an image that has long stood for the suffering that artists endure at the hands of society – and, in countries like South Africa, could also represent the dire state of arts funding.

The myth is undoubtedly a powerful one, and Bailey’s rendering of it is spectacularly evocative. A different version of Orfeus premiered at Spier last year, but in its current location (an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of Grahamstown) it really is a site-specific performance to beat all site-specific performances.

The audience is led by storyteller Jane Rademeyer through a few hundred metres of veld to a desolate spot. Buffeted by the elements, we sit around a blazing fire, watching Andile Bonde perform the role of ritual guide while Rademeyer introduces the narrative in haunting cadences.

Bailey has built the production around the musical talents of Bebe Lueki, who composed the songs in Orfeus and who, as Orpheus, communicates only through song. After Eurydice (Nondumiso Zweni) has died, the audience is invited to follow the impish Abey Xakwe, playing the ‘Frog’, or guide to the underworld. We pass through a barricade of car tyres and the crosses of a crumbling cemetery, entering Hades’ kingdom – in a neat meta-theatrical gesture – through a cupboard curtained by white uniforms on coathangers.

The torments of Prometheus, Tantalus and Sisyphus are devastatingly transmuted into a contemporary idiom. There is the ‘Broken Man’, stretched on a rack, bound by wires, being tortured with bolts of electricity; clever lighting casts the enormous shadow of his crucifix form onto a nearby rockface. There is the ‘Forgotten Man’ – both forgotten by others and having forgotten his own identity – standing near-naked in a pool of water (and, given the icy wind leaving even warmly-clad audience members shivering, this must surely count as one of the bravest performances at the festival!). There are the ‘Shoemakers’, young children chained together in a sweatshop, imprisoned behind barbed wire while a speaker overhead screams out fascist speeches.

As Xakwe encourages the audience to “shine your torches on them!”, we are drawn into an uncomfortable voyeur-like complicity (a discomfort heightened by the knowledge that these children in fact come from the local township, where their real-life living conditions are probably not much better).

Finally, at the centre of Hades, we meet the King of the Underworld – a rascally cameo by Nicholas Ellenbogen – who parades his bevy of female ‘Merchandise’ before sending the doomed couple on their way.

Bailey and his Third World Bunfight team have, of course, already established a reputation for their ‘Africanised’ versions of western myths and works of literature; this approach is open to criticism because it expounds an essentialist view of Africa as a primal place where the supernatural (superstitious?) elements of ancient Greece or pre-modern Europe, long since lost to the secular west, remain.

Nevertheless, critics will be hard pressed to find fault with Orfeus. It is truly invigorating theatre, conceptually original and well executed. Strong performances match the incomparable open-air setting, while Lueki’s music is combined with well-crafted text to produce an unsettling atmosphere for a play that is, at once, a cry of despair and an affirmation of faith.

Across town, Medea (m/other house) is another staging of Euripides’ play in a South African context (Bailey did it a few years ago, but he was by no means the first; Guy Butler had attempted to do so as far back as the 1950s). Director Ingrid Wylde has adapted Liz Lochhead’s text so that it leaps from multilingual South African colloquialisms to language in the register of neo-classical English drama. Although slang and accent mark the production as local, its scope encompasses any twenty-first century place where the chorus can declare, “We know the score, we’re all survivors of the sex wars”.

Yet the story of Medea speaks directly to the South African polity. Medea was a ‘barbarian’ princess who used magic to help the Greek Jason and his band of marauding golden fleece-seekers, the Argonauts, betraying her own family in doing so. She and Jason fell in love and had children; yet, when she travelled with Jason to Athens, he abandoned her in order to marry the daughter of the local king, Kreon. In the play, she plots revenge against Jason and Kreon and, in her rage, kills her own children. Through Lochhead's words, Wylde establishes at least two connections to contemporary SA: “The Athenian (male) society of Euripides’ time had a smug attitude of unthinking superiority to foreigners and women”; thus, the xenophobia Medea experiences and the domestic violence that drives the action of the play were decidedly not “unrecognisable, quaint or antique” to Lochhead when she was writing her updated version.

There are other resonances. One need hardly mention the disturbing frequency of family murder-suicides in South Africa. Moreover, Jason’s decision to spurn Medea symbolises any number of decisions within the corridors of power in this country, in which matters of principal come a distant second to political expediency.

Mediated by the responses of the chorus, our sympathy for Medea (Emily Whitefield) waxes and wanes. At some moments, it seems that her outrage and desire for vengeance are justified; at others, when she resolves on and ultimately enacts the horrific act of killing her own offspring, she threatens to go beyond the bounds of humanity.

This production of Medea, by the TheatreBabel collective, is also significant in that it is free – one of numerous shows and events at the festival forming part of the organisers’ efforts to make it accessible to a wider audience.